08:37 – The Greek parliament has once again voted in favor of complying with the Troika’s new “austerity” terms, which amounts to committing national economic suicide in aid of being allowed to remain in the eurozone. And it’s all for nothing. The Greek people seem to believe that staying in the euro guarantees that they will continue to receive the huge subsidies they’ve been receiving for a decade or more, allowing them to maintain a much higher standard of living than they earn. It doesn’t. Greeks will never see a cent of the additional money that the Troika may “lend” to Greece. Those funds will be used to benefit Greece’s creditors, and only the creditors. Meanwhile, Greece will continue going deeper and deeper into debt until it all finally collapses. Greece would be far, far better off departing the euro, defaulting on everything it owes, and returning to the drachma. Yes, that would mean that Greece would be unable to borrow money on the open market for at least a decade and probably two and that Greeks would suffer deep poverty for that same period, but that’s actually the best they can hope for.
On Jen’s recommendation, I started reading Ken Benton’s SurviRal last night. She said it wasn’t a great book, but it was worlds better than most of the recent PA fiction. She’s right. The guy writes competently, and the book is reasonably well edited. It’s a bit odd in that the protagonists are a married couple of anti-prepping clueless Denver suburbanites who are religious but not obnoxiously so, but have a well-prepared brother down in the sticks a hundred miles or so south of them. This is the first recent PA novel I’ve read that I haven’t wanted to start marking up with a red pen, put a circled D or F on the front page, and add a note to try again and get it right before submitting it.
More work on science kits today.
As I understand it, the only benefit for the Greek people is that some bank liquidity will be provided, or at least perhaps that will be the case. There’s a real push back from some non-Euro members of the EU over using a EU-wide fund to provide liquidity to Greek banks, but since the EU is a profoundly un-democratic organization, run by Eurocrats, it probably doesn’t matter what the non-Euro member states want.
Return to the Drachma and repudiation of all debt owed to the EU, with a symbolic burning of all bond documents on the steps of the Parliament building is my recommendation. If they want to include a few Eurocrats in the bonfire, so much for the better.
It will be interesting to see what happens when Illinois goes bankrupt. They are only a few years or another recession from hitting that wall. Unlike cities, there are no provisions for states going bankrupt.
The EU bankers remind me of the Detroit pension managers. They decided that if the returns on their investments exceeded expectations for the year, they would send a bonus “13th check” to the pensioners. Then, after the 2008 recession and returns fell, they decided to continue to send the checks since “it wouldn’t be fair” to stop them. Needless to say, this was bad for the pension fund balance. Alas, nobody has gone to jail over this from what I can tell.
The scary thing is what’s going to happen as this becomes more widespread. The early bankruptcies of cities and large corporations have been covered by the rest of the state or nation bailing out the creditors and retirees. That’s (barely) sustainable when bankruptcies are arriving sporadically and one at a time. What happens when they start occurring more frequently and on a larger scale?
As you say, Illinois isn’t far from the edge, and California isn’t far behind, and there are scores of cities and towns that are bankrupt by any reasonable definition. My guess is that for now the states will continue bailing out the cities, and the feds will continue bailing out the states. After all, they don’t want to get the public employee unions upset, whose members are for some inexplicable reason allowed to vote. What’s a few trillion more on the national debt? The fed can always produce more money from nothing. Until the merry-go-round stops.
Just installed W10 on a system at work. This was a real install and not a VM instance of W10. The system was running W8.1 and I elected to do the W10 install over the existing W8.1 installation.
Took about one hour and surprise, everything works. All the application work, all the settings are correct, even down to the desktop arrangement. There were no issues encountered during any phase of the install.
The Spartan browser is fast, noticeable faster than Chrome or Firefox in my unscientific testing.
It will be interesting to see what W10 looks like on my Surface and if the system changes from desktop mode to tablet mode when you remove the keyboard. I suspect MS knows this release needs to be done correctly and I think, from my limited testing, they may be real close.
I have found nothing that is a deal breaker for upgrading all the systems at work with W10 when it becomes available.
We may yet see a return to physicians being paid in chickens or produce, and only those with useful skills who are willing to work will be able to eat. I for one am very tired of supporting worthless drones, and I know I’m not alone.
As Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat shit and die.”
I’ve been playing with W10 in a VM, and it looks pretty good. I’ll probably risk it on my Windows machine (which is mostly just gaming, plus a little Desktop Publishing), when I won’t be needing it for a while. Main machines remain Linux, of course.
The problem with worthless drones is, of course, that not feeding them means they come at take what they need. They have no alternatives. If the US goes down that path, it will be very ugly indeed. I’d much rather see secessions, with healthier parts separating from less healthy parts. That would at least contain the ugliness to those areas with impossibly high percentages of “drones” .
Which is why we want to get away from an area with a high number of underclass drones and relocate to an area where people don’t believe the world owes them a living. And it’s also why we are prepared to defend ourselves and our property.
I’m still not expecting the sudden crash that OFD and others expect, but even the slide into dystopia that I do expect will be bad enough. I’m not too concerned about how local LE will behave. They are, after all, locals before they’re LE. And neither the state government nor the fed government have the resources to enforce their dictates on remote areas. We plan to make a lot of friends in our new hometown.
Remember what happened to the revenuer in Earl’s Copperhead Road.
The deceased guy with the 1,200 guns+ has been identified. He only had 6.5 tons of ammo. Seems kind of light for 1,200 guns. I wonder what the “walls lined up to 6 feet high” of stuff consisted of. Weird.
Thanks a lot OfuckStick!
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has “clarified” requirements for individuals becoming naturalized citizens by stripping out the requirement of defending the United States through military service.
Whether you believe in the US Military or not, should you *not* get to vote if you elect to not serve the country if called upon? That seems like a fair trade.
How far can this foolishness go.
Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are history in Connecticut.
Under pressure from the NAACP, the state Democratic Party will scrub the names of the two presidents from its annual fundraising dinner because of their ties to slavery.
Obola has done more to harm Blacks than slaver owners with his welfare entitlement policies, beer summit, blame the cops for Black deaths, Justice Dept. investigations, ignoring B on B violence, etc. But, since Obola is Black, YAAAYYYY!!!!!
End of soapbox.
While I think the only place for the draft is the history book, allowing immigrants to become naturalized citizens without swearing to defend their country of choice is foolish.
If you’re not willing to defend the country you’re asking to take you in, get out.
Nowadays, they arrest you for defending your country. ISTR that the feds arrested guys whose only “crime” was shooting at wetbacks who were attempting to cross the border illegally.
I’m surprised they haven’t arrested the armed citizens who showed up to defend military recruiting stations.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who can’t prove that he or she has at least one great-great-grandparent who was a US citizen is not a citizen and should be forcibly deported.
Oh, wait. I just realized that that might have been a “micro-aggression”. Tough shit.
I’m surprised they haven’t arrested the armed citizens who showed up to defend military recruiting stations.
Army to recruiters: Treat armed citizens as security threat
We are living in Heinlein’s crazy years. Pray that it does not get much worse.
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2013/07/17/4357/
OFD maintains that there will be roving bands of cannibals in a couple of years. Me, I’m with RBT, we will slowly sink in dystopia but the government will do its best to feed the underclass.
Just hope we don’t end up with Nehemiah Scudder.
Just hope we don’t end up with Nehemiah Scudder.
Obola is up in 2016, the year dictatorship took over. He could be “The First Bunghole”.
Well, hell, that would include me. At least three of my four grandparents were immigrants. I’m not sure my father’s parents ever naturalized. My mother’s father did; not sure about his parents. I don’t know about my maternal grandmother, but she considered herself Scottish, not American, so I’d guess not.
Sorry, SteveF, but you’re gone. 😉
Actually, I’d probably settle for someone having at least one direct ancestor who was a US citizen, whether native born or naturalized, and “anchor babies” don’t count as US citizens. Just being born on US soil is insufficient.
Just hope we don’t end up with Nehemiah Scudder.
That would be scary to the max. Religious dictatorships don’t go well for anyone, including the faithful.
I need to read “Revolt in 2100” again.
The Greek parliament has once again voted in favor of complying with the Troika’s new “austerity” terms, which amounts to committing national economic suicide in aid of being allowed to remain in the eurozone. And it’s all for nothing.
I think that I am starting to understand some of the subtleties going on here. The Germans are scared that they will end up with the Franks and the PIIGS. That is very, very sobering. Individually, not a big deal but collectively, the German economy is going to take a huge hit.
Just being born on US soil is insufficient.
Were any of your relatives native Americans? If not, get out.
Bitch at Apple all you want for their control of their product, including the software. But I least I don’t have to worry about nefarious software.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/advanced-spyware-for-android-now-available-to-script-kiddies-everywhere
Bad news buckaroos and buckerettes if you are running Android.
Um, right. You don’t have to worry about someone hacking into your iPhone and iPad because they’re hacked before they’ve left the shop floor.
“Were any of your relatives native Americans? If not, get out.”
Native Americans aren’t.
The idea of citizenship simply by location of birth is a relic of empire and should be eliminated. When I was born in 1944 I was merely a British Subject (Canada did not introduce Canadian citizenship until 1946) but as a British Subject, I could live and work anywhere in what was the the British Commonwealth.
But the Commonwealth is long gone. It would not be unreasonable to require both parents to be citizens or at least landed immigrants (green card holders in the case of the US) for any children to get citizenship. Good luck getting that changed.
Native Americans aren’t.
Were any of your relatives Neanderthals? If not, get out.
Yes, actually, I do have Neanderthal ancestors, as do most people of Northern European heritage. Red hair is one Neanderthal marker.
So is testosterone. I’m sensing a lot of that in this thread.
Hey, can I vote multiple, multiple times?
1.) 1609 Jamestown and 1620-30 Mayflower-Winthrop Fleet
2.) Intermarriage with 17th-18th-C Native Murkans, thus knocking back ancestry to the last Ice Age here
3.) Red hair, knocking it back still further to Neanderthal
4.) Father, uncle, both grandfathers and me in 20th-C Murkan wars
I should be able to cast many tens of thousands of votes by my reckoning…